The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (20 page)

“Not enough.”

The door slid shut and a second later, the elevator cab shifted, and began to move toward the lobby. A soft chime told us we were passing the second floor. My mind wandered as I studied my distorted features in the brushed-steel surface of the elevator wall. I grinned and the horrible, blurry face bared its teeth back at me.

Suddenly, I had an epiphany. “Sawyer, what if the thing my dad talked about was the guy with the horns?”

“The Silen?”

“Yeah.”

“I can believe it. You know, that puts yesterday into perspective. When we carried the mirror to the church, and we were talking all kinds of weird shit, ramma-lamma-ding-dong, or whatever. You said it can put ideas in your head, that’s how it became your father’s muse.”

Noreen made a face, turning to look at us. “What are you talking about?”

“Yesterday,” I said, as the elevator made that
ding
noise again. “I told you about it, earlier. When we went to my dad’s house yesterday, me and Sawyer took the mirror and put it in the car. It was like we were sleepwalking.”

“So you’re saying that devil thing made you open a portal to another world?” she asked. “Do you guys have any idea how messed-up that sounds?”

Sawyer bit his bottom lip, sucked on it for a second, and said, “Yep.”

“I don’t know if—” said Noreen, and stopped herself, a look of mild confusion flashing over her features. Or perhaps it was concern. She faced the door again, clasping her hands in front of her waist as if she were praying for the door to open. “I...think I’m going to call the mechanic and see how long it’s going to take to get my car back.”

Sawyer’s face fell. Noreen’s voice was a husky murmur. “You guys are kinda starting to scare me.”

Ding.

“I understand,” said Sawyer, and leaned against the back of the elevator cab. “I don’t really know what to say. Other than, well, we’re not crazy. And we’re not on drugs.”

“And if we could ever find that video tape, we could prove it,” I added.

Noreen spoke over her shoulder, not turning around, “It’s a little convenient, ain’t it? That it suddenly came up missing?”

I heard a
tap
noise from somewhere, but ignored it. My eye caught the digital floor readout over the door, a black box with a red number inside. It was slowly flashing the number 1.

As I stood there watching it, I heard the cab chime again.
Ding.

I glanced over at Sawyer, but he was still pining for Noreen, staring at her with worry in his eyes. I could tell that he was feeling trapped by the situation. He flinched, and reached up to wipe at his cheek, looked down at his hand. A heat-prickle of fear wormed up my spine, made my hair tingle.

We both looked up at the ceiling. Water was leaking through the light fixture, dripping on us.

“Uhh. Guys?” said Noreen.

She backed away from the door. A thin rivulet of water was running out of the top of it, streaming onto the floor, now pouring, welling around our feet. My heart pounded at this surreal turn of events, and my eyes rolled in their sockets as I began to see more water, dribbling through cracks and crevices into the elevator cab, gurgling down the gleaming surfaces.

I gasped, lurched backwards. My pants were soaking it up, chilling my feet, infiltrating my shoes. We migrated to the back of the tiny brushed-steel room and pressed ourselves against the walls of the box.

Ding.

The lights sparked with a gunshot-like
CRACK
and a shower of stars, which sizzled, leaving us in darkness.

The door opened with a casual
hiss-clunk
, letting in a faint blue light....

And a hell of a lot of water.

A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

T
HE WATER WAS ALREADY UP
to my waist by the time I realized what was happening. All I could see was a dim blue-black rectangle, glassed over by a deluge of freezing-cold water, which, as it splashed a mist of droplets into my face, I tasted and recognized as salt-water. All three of us began to panic in terror and confusion, screaming and trying to scramble backwards up the wall to get away from it.

It came in at a roaring rush, sweeping our legs out from under us with its force.

Somehow, I sensed that the room was tilting backward, so I began to crab-walk up the wall. The water surged up around us, filling the cab with a crackling liquid darkness. I could see tiny fish darting around in it, shiny silver knives shooting back and forth in a frenzy.

At the final moment before we were totally under, the three of us shared our horror, glancing into each others’ eyes. We all took a deep breath of stale, hot air, and then we were swallowed up. An instant later, there was a gargantuan metallic
thud
as the elevator cab came to rest on some soft surface.

Sawyer was the first toward the door, leading a contrail of bubbles, kicking me in the elbow as he went.

I followed close behind, pulling Noreen by the jacket. Her purse scooped water at her side, constricting her movement, a little leather satellite that spat out the bits and pieces of her life. I ripped the strap from her arm and let it fade into the black.

Sawyer turned, reached in, grabbed Noreen’s arm, braced his feet on the doorframe, and dragged her out of the elevator as if it were a grave.

I pursued them, pulling furiously at the water, my lungs beginning to cramp.

The room continued tilting as we burst out of the door, and I could hear the faint boom below me as it slammed dully onto its back. I chanced a look between my feet and saw it in the gloomy deep blue, a hulking dark cube with steel cables noodling out of both ends like a fist full of licorice.

We were in some enormous body of water.

A chain snaked downward into a never-ending void and a rippling silver curtain undulated overhead. A great white crescent hovered beyond the silver, and some part of my consciousness registered it as the moon.

My muscles shrieked in agony, alarm bells going off in my head as my mind howled for oxygen. I fought against the water, trying to reach the surface before I could give in. A strange, melodic sort of apathy crept in around the edges, suffusing me with calm.

My chest, my ribs began to quiver in anticipation of air, flexing, trying to draw breath.

I fought the urge to suck water as the ceiling of mercury came at me, shredded by trillions of tiny bubbles. Beside me, my friends clawed for salvation with reaching hands, time and again, their hair clouding around their heads in billowing tendrils.

My lungs threatened to cave in, I couldn’t do it anymore. I finally let a little of the heavy sea-water into my mouth.

It wouldn’t be so bad to die,
I thought, the sea bellowing in my ears.

My chest raged like a trapped animal within me, begged to be filled with water.

The brine—so much like blood on my tongue—gushed into my throat as I put my hand out one last time and touched the sky. I broke the surface and shotgunned the ocean from my mouth in a blast of vapor.

The others did the same. We floated, gasping, transfixed.

Soaring above us was a night sky unlike any we had ever seen, even more lustrous than what I remembered from the city beyond the mirror. A black deeper and richer than any obsidian filled the heavens from horizon to horizon, salted with uncountable stars, pinpricks of light that rippled like music.

It was a serenade gilded with ten thousand shades of ten thousand colors, more brilliant than any diamond on Earth, unfouled by the lights of any city.

Even as starved as I was for air, I couldn’t help but forget to breathe.

Tears laced my eyes as I drifted, in awe at the omnipotent majesty of the sight of it. The same pale moon loomed ominously in the center of the abyss, masked by the same orange orb as before, both of them scarred from rim to rim, every mile.

“Ohhhh...”
moaned Noreen, her jaw shuddering as the cool wind stripped her face of heat. “Ohhhh...my...
God.”

Sawyer threw both fists into the air and gave a loud whoop. “I told you! I
told
you! Ha-
haaaaaa! Yeah!”

I tore my eyes away from the spectacle and gave them a wide grin. I felt a hot tear trace the curve of my cheek. We bobbed for a little while, marveling over the incredulous view. A voice brought me back from my reverie.

“Hey, over here,” said Noreen, and we swam over to where she was clinging to a strange sort of buoy made of wood. It looked like some sort of simplistic Viking funeral pyre, a tall tripod of slender driftwood logs nailed to a small platform about four meters across to a side.

We clambered onto it and huddled, shivering, inside the tripod.

“So cold,” I said. I was shivering so hard I probably looked like I was being electrocuted. “Where the hell are we? I mean, I’m guessing we’re back in the other-world.”

“Destin,” said Sawyer. “We’re in Destin. It’s actually real. I can’t believe it.”

Noreen took off her shirt and jacket and squeezed the water out of her top. Her white bra glowed against her skin in the light of the moon. “I believe we’re somewhere in the Aemev. This looks like a waypoint buoy.”

“That means we’re near a ship lane,” said Sawyer.

I wrung out my own shirt, as did Sawyer. Noreen put hers back on and curled into a ball on the platform.

“I assume that’s a good thing,” I said, putting my shirt and jacket back on. The leather kept me protected from the wind, but it did nothing for my soaked cargo pants. My legs were chilled to the bone. I jogged in place, trying to get some circulation going.

“It’s a very good thing,” Noreen said, and added, “Providing there’s a boat coming sometime in the next several months.”

“Well, if we haven’t t-t-t-time-traveled—is that even a thing?—if we haven-n-n’t traveled back in time, then we sh-sh-should be in a point after the final book in the sssseries has taken place,” Sawyer said. He hugged his knees and draped his black overcoat over his shoulders like a safety blanket.

“So we shouldn’t have to wait too awfully long. By the end of the latest book, Ain and the settlers on K-Set had established a trade route with regular runners. They were talking about building a railroad, but it was too expensive to build more than one track that far.”

“That sucks,” I said. “If there was a track bridge, we could start walking.”

“Yeah.”

Noreen sneezed. “I wish I’d brought my suitcase on the elevator.”

“I don’t think you would’ve been able to get it out and get topside with it,” said Sawyer. “It looked like you were having a little trouble with that pocketbook.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, reaching over and slapping him on the arm. “Thanks for taking my purse away from me, you asshole. Now I have to cancel my debit card and get a new driver’s license.”

“Hey, that was Ross, not me. Besides, I don’t think you’re going to need
any of that
here,” Sawyer said, and we all laughed.
“Whatsoever.”

The night tapered into near-silence, broken only by the sound of the waves slapping against the sides of the buoy-platform. I began to dry out, which only marginally lessened the chill of the wind.

“I hope my boss doesn’t fire me for not showing up for work in the m-m-m-morning,” said Noreen.

I heard Sawyer move, trying to cover more of his body with his coat. “I just hope we can get back hom-m-m-me at some point. I’d hate to kn-n-n-n-now we were stuck here forever this t-t-t-time.”

“I think the Silen sent us back the first tim-m-m-me. He was the last thing we saw before we woke up on Earth,” I said. “Whatever he is, I believe he might have the ability to go b-b-b-back and forth...between the two worlds. I think we’re going to have to track him-m-m down if we want to get back.”

Sawyer coughed, his breath misting in the air. “I don’t even know where to b-b-begin looking.”

“First things first: we have to get off this rrrrrraft. What are these things here for, anyway?”

Noreen stirred. “They’re here ffffffor people that go ooooverboard or ships that capsize. So they have somewhere to g-g-go, to get out of the water and wait for rescue.”